Using the Charmed Model to Elucidate the Underpinnings of Contrast in Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging

Silvia De Santis¹, Yaniv Assaf², Derek K. Jones¹

The CHARMED model was used to understand whether and where DKI contrast could be explained in terms of the underlying axonal geometry, calculating K directly from the propagator used in the CHARMED model and verifying the correlation between K and the CHARMED parameters in vivo. This work demonstrates that the information contained in DKI overlaps with the information extracted by CHARMED in areas of higher intra-voxel directional coherence, while a different information content in areas of non-negligible fibre dispersion.